Why OO Matters (in F#)

F# is a functional-first programming language that comes with a substantial object-oriented feature set. It is so feature-complete in fact, that almost any C# class can be ported over to F# code with little substantial alteration.

However significant, this subset of the language is seeing limited appreciation from the community, which I suspect is partly fuelled by the known criticisms of OOP and partly by a desire to be different than C#. After all, this is a functional-first language so we can just replace all our classes with functions. There is also the opinion that OOP in F# merely serves as a compatibility layer for .NET, so it’s really only there to cover those unfortunate scenarios of having to use a library that accepts interfaces.

Enabling Abstraction

One of the most important aspects of maintaining a nontrivial codebase is controlling complexity. Complexity can be contained by partitioning code into logically…